Grave Gamer News & Views — silent hill downpour

Konami Promises Silent Hill HD Collection and Downpour Patches Are Coming to Town

What a mighty coinky-dink.  I just acquired a copy of Vatra’s Downpour last night.  The game is a sight better than reviews and jilted fans would have you believe, but after a handful of hours guiding Murphy Pendleton through the rainy, foggy streets of the Hill, it quickly became evident who the real villain of the show is: the terrible, glitchy coding.

The HD Collection suffers a worse fate given that gamers already have a bug-free precedent established in their minds when it comes to how SH2 and 3 should play (I’m being told that the audio actually syncs with the action in the PS2 originals – still waiting for confirmation).  The ports and new sequel share overlapping fuck-ups such as frame rate slowdown and jarring crashes whenever trophies are earned.  In my playthrough, Downpour is specifically prone to freeze in place during auto-saves, and the targeting system goes positively ape-shit the moment more than one enemy threatens you.

All in all, I’m confident Konami doesn’t care to have these titles out there like this, which is why they’ve released word on how they intend to rectify this horror:

“…development teams are currently creating online patches for both games, which will fix the frame rate issues, the audio-synching in Silent Hill HD Collection, and the Auto-Save issues in Silent Hill Downpour.”

Since the patches are still being brewed, the company states we’ll see them in the next few weeks.  Remember when games weren’t broken out of box?  No?  Yeah, my memory’s a bit foggy, too.

RUN MURPHY RUN by Louise Liang

Earlier in the week, Konami promised ETA’s for all three Silent Hill games planned for 2012 and they’ve made good.  I figured the publisher would’ve wanted to spread their best-selling horror franchise out among the proceeding months, but they seem to think cramming all three titles into one month is acceptable.  Goddamn them for knowing what I want.

• Silent Hill HD Collection (PS3, Xbox 360) -...